AI (Already) Killed the News Editor

Cory Corrine:
We are living in an era of profound revelation, not solely because of artificial intelligence, but because of what AI is revealing about us, our belief systems, our narratives, the constructs we've built our world upon. It's reflecting back the way we process truth, the biases embedded in our institutions and the structures that dictate power. In real time, AI is showing us how much of our reality is built on stories and how easily those stories can be rewritten.
The Intersect is a new show about how technology, media, and culture are not separate, but inseparable. Together, they form what I think of as our intersectional reality. It's a space where information, identity, and power collide. We're already living in an AI-driven world, but as humans, we are utterly unprepared for it. And for this first episode, I had to start with the story I lived firsthand, the story of how AI replaced not just jobs, but the function of truth itself. AI killed the news editor. This is not a metaphor, it happened, and it's where this journey begins.
My guest today is Katie Drummond, the Global Editorial Director of WIRED. She was formerly SVP of Global News and Entertainment at VICE Media, where she led the company's global expansion, and in time its contraction. Her previous roles include Deputy Editor of Bloomberg Digital, Editor-in-Chief of Gizmodo, The Verge, among other impressive digital editorial titles. She's a force in this industry, a colleague I admire deeply, and also consider a friend. We've worked closely together, often under extraordinary pressure through layoffs, pivots, broken models, and deep institutional volatility. There's a bond that forms when you navigate that kind of entropy together, and you'll hear it.
What struck me most in this conversation is just how quickly we aligned on something I've been wrestling with: that AI didn't just replace the human editor, it made the idea of editorial judgment obsolete. It replaced the people whose job it was to decide what mattered, what was real, with algorithms designed to exploit our vulnerabilities. And the surreal part, it didn't just happen in some imagined future, it happened a decade ago. If this conversation resonates, if you're asking these same questions, please subscribe now, wherever you're listening. And if you have thoughts, feedback, ideas, I want them, send me an email, ideas@theintersectshow.com. Let's talk to Katie.
Katie Drummond.

Katie Drummond:
Hi.

Cory Corrine:
Welcome to The Intersect.

Katie Drummond:
Thank you for having me.

Cory Corrine:
I'm so glad to see you in person.

Katie Drummond:
I'm glad to see you too. I'm happy to be here.

Cory Corrine:
It's been too long.

Katie Drummond:
It has.

Cory Corrine:
How's your mental, physical? You're about to go on vacation.

Katie Drummond:
My mental, physical, mentally, physically, existentially very tired, you know what I mean? But at a surface level, good, leaned back, relaxed, finishing up the work week, and then going on vacation for a week with my daughter.

Cory Corrine:
Do you want to tell me where?

Katie Drummond:
Somewhere in Europe. Her first big international trip so she's very excited.

Cory Corrine:
This is very exciting. Thank you for doing this before you jet set.

Katie Drummond:
Oh, I'm happy to do it. I'm excited to talk. My favorite subject, my favorite thing to talk about is journalism, unfortunately for me.

Cory Corrine:
Yeah, big topic. big topic.

Katie Drummond:
Yeah, yeah.

Cory Corrine:
Okay. Well, if you'll humor me-

Katie Drummond:
I will.

Cory Corrine:
Thank you. I have very much been looking forward to this conversation. As soon as I had this idea for The Intersect or what I wanted to talk about in episode one, I knew I wanted to talk to you.

Katie Drummond:
Oh, thank you.

Cory Corrine:
Yeah, I really did. And I also, just for the record to be clear, before I heard your name uttered out of Kara Swisher's mouth on Pivot, which when, I mean you were doing CNN hits before that and all that, but when I heard it, I was just like, "Oh, my colleague in arms." I was very proud.

Katie Drummond:
Thank you. I mean, that was a big deal for me too, that one. It was a scary one.

Cory Corrine:
Well, we'll get into it. Yeah. You were awesome, by the way.

Katie Drummond:
Thank you.

Cory Corrine:
You were awesome. But I was like, "Damn it, I mean, this is great, but also I need Katie." And so anyway, I just thank you.

Katie Drummond:
Thank you.

Cory Corrine:
Okay, so humor me while I set up the thesis of our convo, which is quite frankly kicking off The Intersect properly. This will be the first episode, and really the whole premise of how I got here. You and I sat together in the trenches of some of journalism's most significant transformation over the last decade. We witnessed firsthand this explosive growth of these new formats and new platforms and audiences, and it was in a lot of ways, very exciting, it was an opportunity, but the revenue continued to just erode, the business model contracted.
We've seen newsrooms gutted, we gutted them. I've personally had to let go of thousands of journalists, and I never imagined that going into a career 25 years ago, why would I have walked in the door? It was chaos and entropy. And that word chaos is very specific for me because I often remember getting on these Zooms with you, and you would be like, "It's so chaotic." And I would be like, "It's so chaotic." And it was just a lot of chaos. I mean, it's chaotic right now, but it was a very specific contraction over the last decade, quite frankly, with these newsrooms.
And so in a quieter time for me this summer, actually right after I visited you at Condé, and you'd been at Condé, or WIRED, I should say, nine-ish months or something, and I was freshly into the CEO role at Refinery having that spun out of VICE Media Group. But it was quieter for me, and I had some time to reflect, and I was just going to start this book in earnest, this ultimately became the podcast, The Intersect, here's my thought, it's been here, AI has been here. In fact, more than a decade ago, AI has killed the news editor. It actually already happened. And as an industry, just the sort of aha moment for me, we just haven't properly reported it because we couldn't, because were inside of the simulation almost, we couldn't see it.
And I had this sort of moment where quite frankly, all these people that I'd fired, not just me, that got fired in these legacy institutions and the ailing legacy institutions and these new journalism orgs that had new ideas, I joined a lot of them, I led a lot of them, and they didn't work out. There was a lot of success and growth and audiences in building these things. But I think in this realization for me of, "Wait, AI actually already killed the news editor." It wasn't just my fault, it wasn't our fault, it was much bigger. Journalism and the InfoSphere had already succumbed to AI.
And I'm going to wrap this up, you need to talk. But the algorithms that we ourselves unwittingly programmed, quite frankly, rudimentary AIs, these algorithms that optimized for engagement, they already took control of information flows and what got prioritized and didn't even show up. And you could even argue that Trump is president for the second time because Truth Social exists. And these are channels that the mainstream media still largely is not, I don't want to say ignoring, but it's not part of the mainstream conversation or the reach. So I would say we're not just in post-truth, just post-institutionalized media. White House Press Corps is being completely rewritten, and I would say there rightly so, because the inputs and outputs are different. They're just different now.
So the idea, this conversation that AI has already replaced, the news editor has unleashed this new fragmented media landscape full of independent creators, podcast, voices that mainstream media largely ignore, that's really the core story that we're just beginning to unpack. But I feel like we've left out the idea that actually AI is at the very root of all of this, it's actually how we got here in the last 10, 20 years. And so, okay, you have always been a fearless voice, always, I just respect you.

Katie Drummond:
I do my best.

Cory Corrine:
You're doing it. And so I would love you to be fearless in this conversation with me. So one, react to that and let's just jump into it. Yeah, go for it.

Katie Drummond:
No, as you were talking, I mean, I think that's all true and right. And I think one of the observations I have made in the last few years is that when people hear the term AI now in the year 2025, they think ChatGPT, LLMs, OpenAI, or they think about DeepSeek and all the coverage they've seen about China and the US AI arms race and what that means. And they're actually thinking about this specific subset of AI technology, generative AI, right? And there has been all of this hand wringing and all of these, very fairly, concerns about copyright and the impact that generative AI will have on media.
But I think that there is all of this sort of hand wringing and obsessiveness about generative AI, but to your point, there's this sort of bigger, much longer term story that I think everybody, or a lot of people in media miss just because of a lack of literacy around what AI is, where it shows up, how it shows up. I mean, myself, among those people. I have worked adjacent to or in technology journalism for a very long time, but I am not sort of an in the weeds AI expert, right? And given the fact that I am sort of tech adjacent, but many journalists are not. It's like, you're not thinking about AI when you're thinking about programming the Facebook newsfeed for the publication that you oversee.
And so I think there were these years and years and years where we talked about social media, we talked about big tech, we talked about how tech was sort of harnessing and taking over the journalism industry, but we weren't having a conversation about AI when in fact, we probably should have been and would have been smart to have had those conversations 10 or 15 or 20 years ago because now, to your point, again, the damage has been done. We're well past the point of no return on what all of those algorithms did to the digital information landscape and the brands that would survive and that wouldn't survive.
And I think, when I think about my own career now, I feel very, very lucky, very, very, very lucky to work at one of the very, very, very few publications that still exists that has enough equity in its name and its reputation that we did not succumb to all of those algorithmic forces. I mean, it was WIRED, damaged and sort of dented financially as a brand in the last 10, 15, of course, as any other brand was. But we have enough of an audience that knows us, that still comes to our homepage, that seeks out information from WIRED that we didn't sort of suffer the same fate as so many other publishers and publications over the last 10 years where it's just like if you were overly reliant on these platforms that you did not own or control, you were at the whims of their algorithms. And we all saw how that turned out for so many publications and the sort of sick irony of it.
And then I'll stop talking and you can respond to all of this, the sick irony of it, and I think about this in the context of VICE all the time, which is that I think we did, especially in my sort of last couple of years there, we did something very specific, which is we said, "We're going to focus less on owned and operated audience. We're going to focus less on audience coming directly to our website because the big audiences out there are on places like TikTok and Instagram and YouTube. They're on all of these other platforms. We need to go find those audiences and bring them the best version of our journalism we possibly can." That sounds rational and reasonable. And we built these huge audiences.
And when I think about the success that we had at VICE on TikTok, we built this massive audience, we were way ahead of the curve. We were pioneering how you tell stories on TikTok. Did we make money from that? No. Were we at the whims of that algorithm to surface our journalism or not? Absolutely. And it was, I mean, one of many errors because human error obviously is a big factor here, but I just think about how so many publications, VICE included, gave so much away, and it was ultimately sort of given to these companies and these algorithms that couldn't give less of a shit really who you are, what your brand is, what it represents to people, what it means to the audience. And if you're a publisher, you're thinking, "Oh, this is really interesting. This is really exciting. We're reaching these massive audiences, we're at the top of the funnel," But never with enough runway to pull those audiences through that funnel and get them to start paying for journalism that you own and that you can control. And that was these sort of fatal errors.
And I think a lot of the hand-wringing that I see now about generative AI and the caution and the care that's being taken by not every publisher but a lot, I think a lot of that is informed by what has happened over the last 10 or 20 years, right? It's like, "Fool me once, but let's not do this again." But I still don't think there's a recognition that there was artificial intelligence infused into all of this entire time.

Cory Corrine:
Yes, yes, yes. Okay, well, I feel so seen. I knew this conversation would just, yes, it'd click. I could say a million things, I'm going to pause for the cause, and I'm going to rewind back on how you even got into journalism because I-

Katie Drummond:
Oh, sure.

Cory Corrine:
You have a philosophy degree.

Katie Drummond:
I do.

Cory Corrine:
And we're having a philosophical conversation. Rewind me back, because you've been tech adjacent, you've been in tech journalism for a long time, you've also been in business journalism, but how did you, from philosophy to journalism, talk a little bit about that? And then how if you think that serves you in some way? I think that that does in this moment.

Katie Drummond:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I knew that I wanted to be a journalist or really a writer or a lawyer. My mom was a writer, my dad was a lawyer so you can guess where that came from, knowing in my heart of hearts that writing was really what I love to do. And my mom died when I was 18, and it's a very uncomfortable thing for me still, it's been 20 years, over 20 years. But that sort of for me was, "Okay, well, life is short. I'm going to be a writer."
So philosophy for me was just like, I need to pick a major, my dad says it can't be creative writing. I tried to enroll in a poetry writing bachelor of fine arts program, and my dad, who is very generous in how he handles his kids, very permissive, wonderful dad, that was a hard line for him of just like, "You're not getting a degree in creative writing. This is not happening. Journalism is going to pay the bills, right? Journalism." But I think for him, in his mind, probably philosophy could be a conduit to law school, it could take you all sorts of different places. So I did a philosophy degree. I ended up loving it despite the sort of on a surface level very useless degree ultimately, you're in that liberal arts, is it sociology, philosophy, psychology, one of those majors where it's sort of mushy.

Cory Corrine:
My daughter just graduated in philosophy.

Katie Drummond:
Oh, well, she'll be fine.

Cory Corrine:
She's about to hike the Appalachia Trail.

Katie Drummond:
Better than fine, that sounds ideal given the state of things right now.

Cory Corrine:
Going off grid. Yeah, go on.

Katie Drummond:
But I think that, and I would joke all the time about what a useless degree it was, and I enjoyed my time getting a philosophy degree, but I think what I didn't realize until I actually became a working journalist, I would get feedback from my editor at my first job, it was like, "You're really good at taking complicated subjects and distilling them. You're really good at synthesis and analysis, at distilling complicated information, making it easy for people to understand, and then explaining to them the broader context and why it matters." And that for me was like, "Oh, right. I just spent four years learning how to do that."
And it ultimately has served me very well in ways that I didn't recognize or that weren't really obvious to me that a degree in philosophy teaches you to think critically about big questions, to take very sort of dense material and put it into an essay format, make an argument out of it, explain your argument, synthesize and analyze information and apply critical thought and critical reasoning to it. And so that, turns out useful skillset. And I do think that has really served me very well as a reporter, as an editor, and then certainly in management when you're thinking about strategy or you're thinking about thorny problems, I think because of that degree and the time that I spent doing that, I am able to do that in an effective way, in a mostly effective way. I mean, I'm not always right, but I'm able to come up with a thesis and argue that out even if it's just in my own head about the right path forward, if that makes sense.

Cory Corrine:
It makes a ton of sense. I mean, I worked with you very closely for many years.

Katie Drummond:
Yes, you did.

Cory Corrine:
And I witnessed that very like, "Oh, this is a chaotic time. I'm going to get as much information as I can, and I'm going to apply rational thought and I'm going to come, "Here's a plan," and then explain that plan to people." But the critical thinking piece, just to go back in my daughter's undergrad and philosophy, there was a time... And just your dad, I love that he was just like, "No, there's math involved here with logic, and you're not just going to be a creative writer." But I think there was a time, I don't know, she's been out of school four or five years now, and where maybe 10, 15 years, my daughter would get a degree in philosophy, sure, that's fine. I mean, I'm also very, "We'll support you guys."
But I think the idea, and she's always been a very critical thinker, I think that's the most important skill right now in a lot of ways, and I'm just jumping way ahead here, but that's the insight. I didn't realize you had a degree in philosophy, and then when I read that and I just thought, "Well, that makes so much sense. And also I think everybody should..." I mean, it may not pay our bills right now, but my point is just that to be able to think critically about what's happening, the intent of this podcast itself, because we're not doing that, we're unable to do that. I think we haven't had enough information about what's actually really going on. Anyway...

Katie Drummond:
Well, and there is so much accelerant on everything, right? When you think about the AI industry, the generative AI stuff, even just that alone, it's like we don't have the keys to that in so many ways, right? It's like that is just big tech doing what it's doing, letting us know what it's doing if it feels like it and we're just sort of sitting as passive observers. And so I think to be able to at least if you're passively observing your world being taken over by a technology, you should at least be able to apply critical thought to what the implications of that might be. That's the least we could hope for.

Cory Corrine:
Well, I think a critical thinker leading publication like WIRED in this moment is exactly what we need. I mean, I'm biased, but you are in the right job.
Okay, I'm going to bring us to our favorite subject, journalist as brand, reporter as brand, people follow people. We've all been saying this for quite some time. But exploring this more indie model, dare I even say creator, journalist as creator model, which it's not that new, it's like we've had anchors, the star system within journalism, but this idea, and I'm using this word that journalist as creator, journalist as brand, you can be a full stack executive of yourself with all the tooling, we don't need the same sort of arsenal whereas we have all of these robots that we can put to work for us and journalist as brand can now lift off because you don't need these huge costs like you did before. You're leading a smaller institution with star reporters, right? Just talk to me about that in a world of creators popping up, how you think about your own staff at WIRED, if you think this model of more independent... Yeah, curious.

Katie Drummond:
Yeah. I think it's interesting because one of the things that I did when I got to WIRED was that I made an observation that the brand felt very anonymous. It was like, "It's WIRED, but who are the people? Who are the faces and the voices of this brand?" And so we have been really trying to build that out in the last year and a half of just getting faces on TikTok, getting talent-led newsletters, having our journalists host YouTube series, all these different levers that we can pull to create a sense of direct connection between the audience and the people who actually make this thing every day, right?
I think that that's a very important sort of guiding principle for digital publishing now is just that people don't connect to NBC News or WIRED, they connect to that really smart editor who's always on TikTok talking about security news, "I love him. Oh yeah, he's at WIRED, it's the "WIRED account. That's what it is," right? It's like WIRED is often I think secondary to the names and the faces and the voices of our journalists. And I think it paints a background, it's a platform for them, right? It's a platform for them. So I think there's sort of like that from an institutional point of view, you can't ignore that that is where audiences are moving, right? So you have to adapt your own institution to that reality.
And then I think you have this, there's this sort of secondary consideration, which is, well, what about the idea of journalists or creators operating without the institution at all? And I think that for me, I would say that my primary reaction to that is if you can swing it, if you can make a living, God bless, good for you, that sounds amazing. I think it takes a certain type of person, a certain type of personality, a certain level of risk tolerance, although certainly having a full-time job is not the safety net that it once was in this industry, but it's a certain personality who I think can really make that work.
The concern I have about it, if I were to have any, is these big journalistic institutions are able to do what they do for good reasons. They have legal teams, they have copy editors, fact-checkers they have all of this, they have insurance in case they get sued over a story and they lose in court that keep them afloat, right? All of this infrastructure in these big institutions exists in part, or at least in my world, when I think about that infrastructure, that exists so that we can do the most high touch, high risk, high impact journalism we possibly can, and all of this infrastructure is here to support us in doing that. You can't replace that with AI. That is just what it takes to do this kind of work.
So I do worry as more independent journalists go off on their own, not that they won't be careful, I think that journalists who go off and run a newsletter or do something independent are rigorous and they're just as good as someone who works at an institution, there's a more concise way of putting it. But I do worry that we will lose some of that high-risk, high-impact reporting that you just need a certain level of infrastructure to be able to execute on. And so I do think that there is an importance in preserving these institutions, evolving them all, yada, yada, yada. But because I worry about the overall well of journalism that will exist or won't exist depending on how the next few years play out in terms of independent creators, if that makes sense.

Cory Corrine:
It does. And I want to dig into it for a second because I'm having my own meta sort of moment about this, where I'm thinking about, and this is our first episode, right? Hi, hi.

Katie Drummond:
Yes, yes, here we are.

Cory Corrine:
And we have our little, I'm looking at Chad over there, at Hayley, Caitlyn on camera, there's a crew, teeny tiny crew, we're all trying to figure out how to make this work, we're bootstrapping this operation right now. I've got this great distribution partner, Dear Media, which incredible, just an opportunity to be able to run, but self-funding this thing. And when I think about, sure, great, but my biggest concerns, I'm like, I don't really have someone to legal this. And sure, I can hire somebody, and LegalZoom isn't going to cut it. And it's okay, the exploration I'm doing, we're all right.
But to your point, if we move into that, maybe this is a problem to be solved, maybe there's a business here for somebody to set up these kinds of infrastructures for these independent creators and journalists, and maybe the Substacks of the world are already doing that. But in terms of taking risks, because we're in an environment where it's hard to see how that risk, because when you have on your big girl pants and you've got the Washington Post and you've got all these institutions behind you with all these really fantastic lawyers and smart editors and journalists, you are emboldened. But in a world where there's a press corps that are being credentialed against if you may or may not have pronouns in your name, then there's a chilling effect.
And so this is a deep, deep, deep, deep chilled effect in that independent journals maybe cannot go after some of these as doggedly and feel protected in the same way. And I think that's something to watch in some way because I don't think it's going to be a very obvious, it'll be like, "Oh, wait, now for the last decade, we haven't had the kinds of stories that have broken open X and Y because of..."

Katie Drummond:
Right, and this is making me think of a conversation I was having with a former colleague earlier this week. So we worked at Gawker Media together, which was the heyday of-

Cory Corrine:
RIP.

Katie Drummond:
You publish a scoop on Gawker and you watch it light up the internet and it was like smoking 20 cigarettes at the same time, which for me is a very good thing. I don't smoke anymore, but if I could.

Cory Corrine:
It's a good time, that's a good time. It's a good time. I.

Katie Drummond:
T's like that feeling, if you were the person, it would go everywhere. And we were talking about how in this era, it is so, so, so incredibly rare to have the kind of story, given how fragmented audiences are now, to have the kind of story from the kind of outlet that can break through across the board. I mean, I think the Atlantic story about Signal is the very rare example of a story that just was universally read, right? It didn't matter whether you followed Bluesky or X or Truth Social, what kind of little bubble you lived in. You saw that story.
And I think with independent journalists and creators and more of these smaller shops and fewer of these bigger institutions, the trend that would follow from that is sort of we are leaning into the fragmentation and leaning into individual journalist who writes for their newsletter audience of 5,000 people and that's sort of that bubble, and then these bubbles overlap on top of each other so there's a bit of a multifaceted Venn diagram of little audience bubbles, but it's just little creator, little audience or sometimes big creator with a big audience but it's not the same as 10 years ago, you're an outlet, you publish on the internet, you publish a big story, and it just goes absolutely everywhere. It's a completely different picture now.
And we were sort of lamenting that over a drink that that is, again, and we're coming back to algorithms and AI at the same time as we're talking about individual journalists and creators, I mean, it's the collision of those two forces is where we are now and is sort of presenting, I think, a lot of challenges for news and information and sort of literacy about what's happening in the world to actually make its way to the entire world, because there is no sort of entire world on the internet, so to speak, it was never the entire world, but that you can reach anymore.

Cory Corrine:
That's exactly right. I mean, we are, I often say, the network of niches. And one could argue that this monolithic media culture that we thought we had was just our own, the one big bubble we were all in, there were a couple of bubbles, and now they're just-

Katie Drummond:
One in New York, one in LA.

Cory Corrine:
Right, yes, I agree. Your point is, and so it's great. We have unleashed this world of investigative and creators and journalism makers, but it's distribution is the real, that's the question, that's the existential. We've seen technology and media, politics and culture increasingly collide. It's really a lot of what we were just talking about. Tech CEOs, influencing policy, political movements, organizing on social, cultural trends driven by tech platforms, this blurring of lines. What brought you to this changing approach, I mean, what counts as a technology story? You hired a bunch of political journalists when you walked in the door. I mean, in my mind, you have to do all of this together right now, you can't think about them separately?

Katie Drummond:
You do all together. Yeah, I mean, I think the dumbest possible answer to that, or the broadest possible answer would be to say, well, actually everything is a technology story, but that's not particularly helpful when you're running WIRED, right? So we have verticals, we have sections, we have desks that define what we cover. We cover security, so we specialize in hacking and cyber exploits and vulnerabilities. And so we have that expertise. We cover science, we cover culture through the lens of digital communication and digital communities. We cover obviously the tech industry and business, we cover consumer technology products. So I sort of try to narrow our focus around, well, sure, everything is a technology company, that doesn't mean we cover everything, we cover these things from a sort of forward-looking, technologically infused point of view.
And where the politics thing comes in is that to me was, okay, we have these verticals, this is what we cover, what are we not covering right now that we could be? We could be covering personal finance, travel, there are all of these different categories that we could say we're going to get into. But when I started the job, this was actually my second day, obviously a very nerve wracking job to start, your boss is Anna Wintour, you work at Condé Nast, I had been working at VICE for five years.,I dressed similarly to this because it's a Friday, but not this, it was very bad.

Cory Corrine:
But you look so chic now, but it's still you, we were talking before.

Katie Drummond:
So you're being Condé-fied. But I woke up I think at 4:00 in the morning on my second day and had had all of these things mulling around in my brain, like, I started in September 2023 so I was like, "Next year there's going to be a US presidential election and there will be a record number of elections around the world in 2024. Oh my God, we're not ready for that at all." And I sent my boss an email saying, "I need to hire a politics team."

Cory Corrine:
In the morning, very early in the morning?

Katie Drummond:
Oh, at 4:00. "Here's why," wrote a little manifesto, "Here's what I need. I want to hire three people. I want to hire an editor." And of course, she wrote back right away, because that's who my boss is, she's amazing. And we did it. And I'll be honest with you, I mean, WIRED has covered politics before, never in such a concerted way, it was something that for some of the staff and for a lot of our audience, there was resistance. And there was like, 'Why are we doing this? It's WIRED. We're a tech magazine. Why are we covering politics?" And I will say, mean, everyone who works at WIRED is very, very smart, these weren't stupid questions, I think they were very valid questions.
And I think that the rationale for us covering politics became more and more obvious as that election cycle went on. You had the Joe Biden robocall in New Hampshire that used AI to mimic Joe Biden's voice. And so chaos right before I think it was the primaries. So you started to see this. And then over the summer, Trump gets shot in the ear, Elon Musk endorses him on X, and all of a sudden you have a very different story on your hands where everyone was like, "Oh." And even I was like, "Well, I didn't see this coming. But yeah, this is why we cover politics now," whether it's hacking, it's AI, it's tech executives and sort of the tech elite infiltrating DC and infiltrating politics, there are all of these different ways in which you can't separate what's happening in technology, whether it's in the tech industry or the development of new technology or the use of technology by malevolent actors, all of these different facets of technology are a politics story on a daily basis.
And then of course, in the last several months, we've just watched the richest person in the world, and probably among the most prominent technology leaders, not just of the moment, but of our lifetimes, wield his power through every federal agency in the United States government. Yeah, it's a tech story, that's what it is. And I'm very, very glad.,I will say, that I sent that email in September 2023 and hired that team because the thought of not being in a position to cover what is happening, I feel physically sick thinking about where we would be as a publication if we were not ready for this moment. But it's this. And I think it's like I had a theory, I had a suspicion, and it proved to be true. I'm not always right, I was right on that one.

Cory Corrine:
Yeah, you were right on that one. Well, I mean, you're fearless. And I mean, I will just props, and we're all very glad that you sent that email to Anna Wintour, and we also... Look in the camera, thank you, Anna, for saying yes.

Katie Drummond:
Yes, she responded positively.

Cory Corrine:
But you guys were set up, I mean, day one, it was go time. Talk to me a little bit about, talk to me about the DOGE story and how you got the team around that, and what did it look like and feel like in your office?

Katie Drummond:
No, I mean, this is with so much, 99% credit to the politics team and the leadership who are alumni of VICE, Tim Marchman, Leah Feiger, who are at WIRED now working with me, Brian Barrett, our Executive Editor, we have a fantastic team of really smart people who know when Project 2025 sort of surfaced, they were reading that very early days and sort of putting the pieces together of, "Okay, this is a playbook basically. If he wins, if Donald Trump wins, what does this mean? Where should we be pointing reporters now to be ready to cover what is being outlined in what is essentially a roadmap for how to run the country through the lens of whatever exactly that ideology is?"
And so I think sort of being very early to that and sort of realizing that this is a playbook, this is a blueprint, we need to take this very literally and very seriously and actually start getting ready to cover what is being outlined here in case he wins. And then over the summer when Trump got shot and Elon jumped in, it was immediately like, "Okay, it's go time. He's going to win. Elon Musk will be next to him. Project 2025 will be in both their backpacks. And so what does that mean for where we need to be focusing?" So we were having those conversations last summer, and there were moments of hope with Kamala, but we were all pretty much like, "Nah, he's going to win. Yeah, he's going to win."
And so I remember talking to the entire newsroom after Trump got shot and Musk endorsed him and saying to everyone, "It is highly likely that Donald Trump will be president again come November. Every single person here needs to start getting ready now." And they did. And they did. And Tim and Leah were so fundamental in really thinking about, it's hard to take a document like that and be like, "Okay, but then what can we extrapolate from that? Where should we start looking?" And so then as soon as DOGE was announced, which was I think right after Trump won the election, it was like, "Okay, we need to jump on this immediately."
And I think that for journalists who go in the front door in DC who cover politics in a very conventional straightforward way, they maybe were not so focused on the Department of Government Efficiency that had been announced. Whereas for us, it's like, "This is the Elon Musk thing. This is where we need to be focused." And so we were focused on it just very early on and asking very basic questions like, "Who actually works for this? How much money do they have? What are they trying to do?"
And so just answering that first question of, "Who works for DOGE?" that was the first big story we had that was like, "Here's who works for DOGE." And it was explosive because it turns out they were 19, 20, 21 years old, former interns at Elon Musk's companies, no government experience. And then that really the floodgate of tips and people working inside of these agencies who were extremely alarmed to have a 19-year-old nicknamed Big Balls asking for a one-on-one with them. And so then we had sort of this first mover advantage where we were first, and so we heard from everyone. And then we have just incredibly skilled journalists and editors who really developed relationships with those sources, and I think take their confidentiality and their safety very seriously and just handle the stories with great care.
That's when I talk about this infrastructure, we have an amazing fact-checking team on staff, we have amazing lawyers who are reading every single story that we publish to make sure it is bulletproof to publish. That's when I think about, to get back a little bit to that creator conversation and the AI of it all and all of this stuff, it's like there is no world in which we could have done all of these stories, we're publishing one or two stories a day, five days a week on this stuff, no world in which we could have done that without the infrastructure of Condé Nast. It just wouldn't have been possible. But for the newsroom, I mean, man, it's been really busy.

Cory Corrine:
It's been really busy, yeah. We are all very grateful for you and your team truly. I mean, just an upshot, you guys were prepared, you were thinking very critically very early on, you're very smart editors, were looking at Project 2025. But in looking in that direction, I mean, that's where the nexus is, that's where the nexus, you just have the right team looking at this with all of the expertise. And without the infrastructure of a Condé, there would be no world in which you could publish the volume that you're publishing and right now-

Katie Drummond:
There's no way.

Cory Corrine:
Because of this existential distribution, I think the volume and the fact that you're hitting it over and over, that you're getting impact just by way of that. And that volume is hard to do. I mean, you can yap all day, but you're doing shoe leather in the digital world reporting of this kind of stuff.

Katie Drummond:
Yeah, like iterative reporting. And it's been interesting to see how it has played out on different platforms because, again, everything is so fragmented that it's like when we publish stories, we have the homepage audience, we have the newsletter audience, but then beyond that, it's like we have the X audience, we have the Facebook audience, we have the Bluesky audience, we have the TikTok audience, we have the Instagram audience, we have the YouTube audience, we have the Reddit audience, we have many audiences. And so trying to get that journalism in front of all of those different bubbles at the same time. And it's just been interesting to see which platforms have been more receptive and which haven't. Like Facebook, when they killed their fact-checking program, and they actually just sort of said, "Floodgates are open," all of a sudden our politics, journalism, after having zero readers referred by Facebook for years, all of a sudden, okay, we're taking off on Facebook again.

Cory Corrine:
Interesting.

Katie Drummond:
It's same vicious cycle. Bluesky which I think leans... Well, I don't think, I know, leans more progressive, more to the left.

Cory Corrine:
All the journalists got on Bluesky.

Katie Drummond:
Yeah, WIRED is beloved on Bluesky. We have this very loyal, receptive audience there, not so much on X. Instagram, we had an audience that for my first year and three months, it was like, "Why is WIRED covering politics?" Because that Instagram account had been built up in an earlier era, and that has now sort of come around. So it's just, anyway, it's been interesting to see, it's not just like you click a button and those stories just go crazy because they're crazy stories, it's like, how do we get this on 10 different platforms in addition to the platforms that we own and operate to make sure that everyone sees them?

Cory Corrine:
And in this case, I mean, those are the jobs we've been doing for a long time, obviously, but in this case, how can we actually have impact? How does this journalism... We have you for eight-ish more minutes, Katie.

Katie Drummond:
Oh, no, that went so fast.

Cory Corrine:
I know, I know I could talk to you all day. But I want to get a little bit to AI in your own newsroom and meta, meta, meta, but using these tools, I do not fear the reaper, I say, use the robots. We've been using the robots. Well, they've been using us, I don't know, both. Because these reporters that you have, I mean, when I first walked into the newsroom, I remember 25 years ago, it's like, "These are the CAR people," and I'm like, "The CAR people? The CAR people?" And they sat in a special different room, it was the library, the library in the newsroom, the computer assisted reporting, the CAR people.

Katie Drummond:
Oh, that's wild.

Cory Corrine:
I know. And they were using Excel spreadsheets, I don't know, making their own SQL database or something. Computer assisted reporting. What a concept. Yeah, that's what a concept. I mean, we're all doing it now. How are your reporters getting into this stuff? What are you guys doing?

Katie Drummond:
Honestly, and maybe it's interesting to have this coming from the person running WIRED and WIRED's publication, very cautiously. So I think there's sort of the IP of it all, right, which is a separate conversation, it's much more a Condé Nast conversation. And that is around protecting our IP and the IP of all of Condé Nast brands in the face of companies essentially scraping it without permission, without compensation. So that's sort of one piece of it where we are very wary, we are very much on guard, we very much believe that the journalism and the storytelling that we do ought to be compensated. It comes back to not learning the right lessons from the social media algorithm era, right? Let's not make that mistake again, let's do everything we can to safeguard our journalism, to be compensated for our journalism, to have a sustainable media operation. So there's that piece of it.
And then there's sort of like, okay, we're very on guard around AI in that context, and then it's about how are we on the backend when we're actually in the guts of the thing doing the journalism, doing the work, how are we actually going to use this technology? Because it is useful. I think that's important as much as it is also just robbery, there is a real utility to a lot of the tools that you can build. And that's actually something that we are just now exploring. So we're talking about things like headline generation and headline guidance, headline best practices, SEO best practices, different approaches to A/B testing. We use AI, or journalists use AI when they're crafting freedom of information requests, anything really manual or they are sort of parsing complicated datasets, stuff that is really manual, really time intensive, really labor-intensive, AI can be a shortcut to that as long as you're checking your work on the other side of it.
But I would say for us, and this is also sort of a Condé Nast thing, and I think, again, going back to just learning the lessons from the first go around, this technology is really interesting, it's potentially really exciting, it's potentially transformational, let's be very thoughtful and cautious about how we use it and where we use it, knowing that the value of what we do is human led and always will be. And so it's really more about how do we facilitate the best possible journalism from the best possible journalists without ever even thinking about replacing those journalists or those photographers or those designers, all of that stuff? This is genuinely a human project. The act of journalism is not something that AI can do, but it can help you do your job better. So I think we're still trying to figure out what that means.
And I think the idea too of AI generated work, whether it's written or photo, that is something that we don't do. We actually just have a blanket ban on it, which I don't think is a forever thing, but I think in this moment in time that we're in I think it's a right now thing, and something that we would do with great care and great transparency. But we have this back page in the print magazine, this is a good example, it's called Six Word Sci-Fi and audiences look at a crazy illustration, and then they submit a six word sci-fi story to match the illustration. We pick a winner.

Cory Corrine:
I know it, I love it.

Katie Drummond:
Thank you. But we had this idea of it would be really fun to use AI to generate that illustration or to generate a short video version of the Six Word Sci-Fi, or to take all of the Six Word Sci-Fi submissions and create images or videos of those. There's something very cool we could do there with AI generated video and AI generated imagery that we're not doing right now, but it's worth talking about because it's sci-fi, it's science fiction, it's supposed to be made up. And so could we use AI in a fun, interesting, creative way in that context? Or use an AI artist, at least an artist who works with AI.

Cory Corrine:
I like that, I like that, I like that. Okay. I have one last question, and this is fun one, last one fun one, yeah. Anything, tell me about a piece of content you've consumed in the last week-ish that's really stuck with you? And this could be long form narrative, this could be on X, this could be on Instagram, this could TikTok anything, AGI could have made it, but tell me why it stuck with you, why it resonated, let's go.

Katie Drummond:
Okay. This is going to be unexpected.

Cory Corrine:
Fantastic.

Katie Drummond:
But you know and I'm very open about the fact that I'm a very heavy TikTok user, so I spend a lot of time just doing this. It's sort of for me all day, you go go and then TikTok for me is, "I just need an hour to be so dumb. I need to just be so dumb for an hour." So that's TikTok for me. And I was thinking about this on the ride over, because last night I went down, you open TikTok, you never quite know what you're going to get. The algorithm is going to give you a mix of stuff you've already seen that you've spent time with, and then they're going to surface new things for you and see if you're interested in them, and then if you're interested, you're going to go all the way down that rabbit hole.
So I went down the most amazing rabbit hole last night, sorry, this is not helpful for anyone, but there's this account called, I believe it's called Amalfi Private Jets. And it's these videos of this young CEO who runs a private charter plane company, like a luxury travel company, where he gets phone calls from this girl, sounds like maybe a college age girl, I think her name is McKenna or McKenzie. And McKenna or McKenzie is calling him to basically book a private jet to Geneva, or, "My dad got mad at me because I crashed the Ferrari, I need to go to London now." And it's just him on the phone on speakerphone with her booking her private plane and kind of rolling his eyes at what a rich little snot she is.
And so you keep going down this rabbit hole of this private jet company, and all of a sudden I'm seeing his account and his post, the CEO, I'm seeing the rich teenage girl's account, I'm seeing the CEO's girlfriend's account where she's posting about what it's like to date the CEO of Amalfi Private Jets. And I sort of enter this all encompassing ecosystem of the Amalfi Private Jets charter company, which then I start wondering, and it's taken over my TikTok feed.
And then I'm like, "Is this real? Is this satire? Is this a fake company or is this just like the smartest, most tactical savviest ad campaign I have ever seen?" Because they created this entire world around this company that is based on luxury and voyeurism and sort of wanting what someone else has, you want the private jet? Of course you do. Is this just a marketing campaign that I have just fallen victim to? Which says a lot again about AI and algorithms and truth versus fiction and sort of what happens when we all exist in our own little information bubble. But I really have enjoyed the last 24 hours of my life getting to know the cast of characters, the cinematic universe of Amalfi Private Jets on TikTok. So that is what I have been spending my time with lately, Cory, in case you want to feel a little bit better than someone else for a minute.

Cory Corrine:
No, my mind is blown. We could just talk about this for an hour, but I think this is actually the perfect anecdote to end because it's whether or not it's real, whether Amalfi Jets or it's marketing, I think that the point is that this world has been implanted in your mind as a reality.

Katie Drummond:
Yeah, whoever created it, I went on Google, I'm like Googling Amalfi Private Jets, I'm like, "Is this a real company? Who is this guy?" The videos have many, many, many views. I mean, whatever they have done with this has been tremendously successful. And I don't know if it's a real company, I don't know if it's a fake company, I don't know if McKenna or McKenzie or whoever is a real person, but they created this like 360 reality, which there are many of those on the internet and that's kind of part of the problem.

Cory Corrine:
That's kind of part of the problem. Okay, well, The Intersect is on it. Thank you.

Katie Drummond:
Look into that.

Cory Corrine:
I'm on it, I'm on it. Thank you, thank you. This was amazing. You're a very smart person and you shared an hour-ish with us, and I'm very grateful.

Katie Drummond:
Oh, well, ditto. Thank you for having me.

Cory Corrine:
The Intersect is distributed exclusively by our partner, Dear Media. Today's episode was produced by yours truly, Cory Corrine, with technical production led by Chad Parizman and coordination by Hayley Duffy. Caitlyn Durcan, an Executive Producer on the show, oversaw communications. A sincere thank you to Paige Port of Dear Media, Marc Paskin, Lesley Silverman, Ike Zhang, Madeleine Utter, and many others from the United Talent Agency for believing in the show from the jump. Thank you to Music for a While and the Alameda Hotel for the use of their beautiful studio space. And a special thank you to my grown daughters, Maygan Melancon and Anna Corrine Haik, for always pushing my thinking. And for those wondering about Amalfi Jets, they are a real private jet company with prolific social media marketing. If you liked our show today, please subscribe right here, wherever you're listening or watching. We'll be back here next week at The Intersect.